There’s a sour irony to the fact that it’s taken the extremely rare mad
cow disease, which has thus far killed a very small number of people in
England, to raise the alarm about the consequences of intensive meat and
milk production. Over the past 150 years the demands of such production
have destroyed much of the world’s ecological balance and impoverished
millions.
...Intensive meat production–these days mostly of beef, veal, pork, and
chicken–is an act of violence: primarily, of course, an act of violence
against the creatures involved. But it is also violence against nature
and against poor people. David Wright Hamilton, a biologist at the
University of Georgia, once wrote that an “alien ecologist observing…
Earth might conclude that cattle is the dominant species in our
biosphere.” The modern livestock industry economy and the passion for
meat have radically altered the look of the planet. Today, across huge
swaths of the globe, from Australia to the western plains of the United
States, one sees the conquest landscapes of the European
mass-meat-producers and their herds of ungulates. Because of romantic
ideas of “unchanging” landscapes it is hard to grasp the rapidity of
this process, or the degree to which it leaves the land changed forever.
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